B.C.’s Kelly Olynyk: Redshirt, then red hot, now ready for the NBA

Mike Beamish, Vancouver Sun03.09.2013

Gonzaga University centre Kelly Olynyk thrusts his ‘We’re No. 1’ digit into the air while walking off the court as the Bulldogs celebrate their 70-65 victory over Brigham Young University during an NCAA basketball game on Feb. 28, 2013, in Provo, Utah.Rick Bowmer
/ AP

South Kamloops basketball coach Ken Olynyk, father of Gonzaga University star centre Kelly Olynyk, watches his team face Mt. Baker during the B.C. high school girls Triple A basketball championships at Langley Event Centre in Langley on March 6, 2013.Arlen Redekop
/ Vancouver Sun

Centre Kelly Olynyk of the Gonzaga Bulldogs prepares to take a foul shot during an NCAA basketball game against the Portland Pilots at McCarthey Athletic Center on March 2, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

Kelly Olynyk of the Gonzaga Bulldogs grabs a rebound during an NCAA game against the Brigham Young University Cougars at McCarthey Athletic Center on Jan. 24, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

Kelly Olynyk of Gonzaga University cuts off a piece of the net as the Bulldogs take the 2013 WCC Championship title by defeating the Portland Pilots 81-52 at McCarthey Athletic Center on March 2, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

Gonzaga University’s Kelly Olynyk reacts as his Bulldogs take the 2013 WCC Championship title by defeating the Portland Pilots 81-52 at McCarthey Athletic Center on March 2, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

Kelly Olynyk of the Gonzaga University Bulldogs drives to the hoop for a layup against the Portland Pilots during their NCAA basketball game at McCarthey Athletic Center on March 2, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

Gonzaga University’s Kelly Olynyk reacts as his Bulldogs take the 2013 WCC Championship title by defeating the Portland Pilots 81-52 at McCarthey Athletic Center on March 2, 2013 in Spokane, Wash.William Mancebo
/ Getty Images

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The buildup for the National Basketball Association draft already has begun in earnest for the father of Gonzaga star Kelly Olynyk, who has been fielding calls from agents eager to represent his 21-year-son, a seven-foot centre with a sweet shooting touch and the ball-handling skills of a guard.

A junior at Gonzaga, the small (7,800 students) Jesuit school in Spokane, Wash., which punches well above its weight in major college basketball, Kelly, the top scorer on the No. 1 ranked basketball team in the NCAA, has until April 28 to declare for the NBA draft.

A high achiever in everything he touches, Olynyk already has a degree in accounting and business and has started working toward an MBA. The accounting degree might come in useful, as the future high net worth president and CEO of Kelly Olynyk Inc.

“I really believe he can be a lottery pick (the first 14 players are drafted by non-playoff teams),” one industry insider told The Sun.

“He’s had a meteoric rise. The Naismith Award, the Wooden Award, NCAA player of the year. He’s a very serious contender for all of them. Who else would you pick?

“His story is so rare. He’s caught lightning in a bottle. From what I hear, he’s a great kid, from a great family who’s going to school for all the right reasons. But there’s a saying in this business: You gotta come out when you’re hot. If he goes back for another year (at Gonzaga), he might slip back a bit (in the 2014 NBA draft). That’s the logic for coming out now.”

Like his son, Ken Olynyk, a former candidate for Canada’s Olympic men’s basketball team in 1976, is pretty adept with crossover moves, too. The athletic director of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops is in the Lower Mainland this weekend coaching his youngest daughter Maya’s team, the South Kamloops Titans, the top-ranked team in the provincial AAA girls’ basketball tournament at the Langley Events Centre.

The senior Olynyk’s off-court duties also include handling his son’s business calls — according to NCAA rules, agents and professional teams are not allowed to contact student-athletes directly — and distributing quotes to reporters eager to know more about a player who is up for every major award in U.S. college basketball this season.

“Yeah, I know who that is,” Ken said, when a conversation with a Vancouver Sun reporter is interrupted by the ring tone/theme music from the old TV sitcom Cheers. “We’ve had a number of agents contact us already. I think I’m polite with all of them. I listen to what they have to say. But I won’t let it interfere with what I’m doing with my daughter, what I’m doing at work or what’s happening with Kelly. It’s a reality at this point. We’re definitely hearing what they have to say. But Kelly won’t make any decision until his college season is over.”

Ken is getting to know the men from Edge Sports International, Priority Sports, BDA Sports and other agencies which represent NBA players, rather intimately, in advance of the 2013 draft.

The need to know more about Olynyk is why the New York Times, Time Magazine, ESPN, TSN, the CBS Sports Network and other media outlets are descending upon Spokane, making life more difficult for Oliver Pierce, the long-time sports information director at Gonzaga, who is running interference to keep Olynyk from becoming overwhelmed.

Notoriety is what every major college sports program in the U.S. craves. But the fascination with Olynyk’s story — and Gonzaga’s rise to become the first university from the state of Washington to be ranked No. 1 in men’s college basketball — is getting close to a stampede. March Madness has come early to Spokane.

“Everybody wants an exclusive,” Pierce said. “All they want is five or 10 minutes of Kelly’s time. But when you put all the requests together for one day, it turns out being three hours. We try to be cooperative, but it’s getting over the top.”

Olynyk was interviewed Wednesday morning on the Jim Rome Show by the edgy, rapid-fire broadcaster who tells radio callers “have a take and don’t suck.”

Rome’s show is followed by millions of listeners on hundreds of stations. Pierce made an exception for Rome, but that was it for the week. Olynyk was shut down from further direct media contact.

“We’re trying to limit interviews and questions to about five times a day,” Kelly explained to the Vancouver Sun via email. “I’m trying to take all the media attention with a grain of salt. It is nice but you are never as great as people say you are. And you’re never as bad as others say you are. For everyone praising you, there’s someone knocking you. And if you pay attention to all the hype, it can turn on you in an instant. I’m just staying motivated and I’m working to reach my potential.”

Olynyk was redshirted last year as part of an outside-the-box plan concocted by the player, Gonzaga coach Mark Few and Kelly’s dad to hold him back for a year. College coaches put red shirts on surplus players, letting them work out with the varsity team in practice, but holding them out of competition to retain their athletic eligibility for another season. The practice is used to cling to a promising player as long as possible when a more developed and experienced one is playing ahead of him.

What is different about Olynyk is that he was redshirted in the middle of this college career, not at the beginning, after playing with the Gonzaga varsity for two seasons. He sat out the 2011-2012 season in favour of Rob Sacre, from Handsworth high school in North Vancouver, the Bulldogs’ starting centre last year who became the last pick in the 2012 NBA draft, by the Los Angeles Lakers.

“Rob was more of a rebounding and defensive presence, and that’s what the Gonzaga needed at the time,” explained Jim Meehan, who covers the basketball team for the Spokane Spokesman-Review. “Kelly used that redshirt year to change his body and develop better coordination, strength and quickness. He used to fall off balance and get charging fouls. You don’t see that anymore. His bigger body gives him a chance to operate inside and be more physical. He already could make the three-point shot. When you have a seven-footer with nice perimeter skills, who can operate inside, it makes for a guy who’s very difficult to guard.”

The result has been a stunning turnabout for Olynyk’s basketball career. He was named West Coast Conference player of the year earlier this week, and is a candidate for the 2013 Naismith Award (men’s college player of the year), the Oscar Robertson Trophy (presented by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association) and the John Wooden Award (basketball prowess combined with academic excellence).

Riding the best record in Division I at 29-2, Gonzaga took over top spot in the AP Top 25 rankings on Monday after Indiana — the pre-season No. 1 pick, a position which the Hoosiers held for nine weeks — lost to Minnesota.

Gonzaga goes into this weekend’s WCC tournament in Las Vegas with a perfect 16-0 record in the conference.

Some larger and more traditional NCAA basketball powers might need the Lewis and Clark Expedition to find Spokane, stuck in the northwest corner of the U.S., but Gonzaga is very big-time, cosmopolitan and international in scope when it comes to recruiting basketball talent.

Players from France, Germany and Poland dot the roster, along with Olynyk and another Canadian, sophomore guard Kevin Pangos, from Newmarket, Ont.

Kevin’s dad is Bill Pangos, the coach of the women’s basketball team at York University in Toronto, a man Ken Olynyk has known for years, from the time he arrived at the University of Toronto to become the men’s athletic coordinator and basketball coach of the Varsity Blues. When Gonzaga was recruiting Kevin Pangos, now a sophomore, Ken Olynyk put in a good word for the program.

“We talked a lot on the phone,” Ken said. “I thought Gonzaga was a great place for Kevin. If you look at a prototypical point guard for Gonzaga, that’s Kevin. That fit couldn’t have been better.”

The gold standard for point guards at Gonzaga is John Stockton, the long-time pick-and-roll partner of Karl Malone and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. His son, David Stockton, happens to be a teammate of Olynyk and Pangos.

Being the sons of NBA players, university and national team coaches (Ken Olynyk is a former coach of Canada’s national junior men’s team), all three Bulldogs have exceptional basketball IQ, the ability to read the flow of the game and sense openings before they appear. Despite his seven-foot frame, Kelly Olynyk was, at one time, a guard, before a seven-inch growth spurt in one year turned him into a post player.

“Both Kelly and Maya are players people like to play with, because they share the ball,” Ken said. “Sometimes we have to encourage them to be a little more selfish and take the shot when it’s there.”

Now 61, Ken Olynyk’s roots are in Revelstoke — he was a two-time provincial high school volleyball champion as well as an elite basketball player. He holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Victoria. After 15 years spent in the Toronto area, he moved his family back to B.C. in 2003 to accept his current position with Thompson Rivers University (formerly University College of the Cariboo) when the school was transitioning from a college to a full-fledged university.

The decision to relocate, however, was not universally greeted with enthusiasm by every family member — especially Kelly, who was born in Toronto along with his siblings — Maya, and an older sister, Jesse, now the sports information director at the University of Northern B.C.

“Kelly was in Grade 7 when we moved back to B.C. — and he was concerned,” Ken recalled. “When he was seven years old, we asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said, ‘I want to play in the NBA.’ He’s always had that as a goal, as a mindset.”

In Toronto, Kelly played age-group basketball with Tristan Thompson (the fourth overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft, by Cleveland), his mother, Arlene, was a scorekeeper for the Toronto Raptors and his dad spent a year on sabbatical as a visiting coach and scout with the NBA team, then coached by Lenny Wilkens.

“It was quite fascinating for me — it was another level altogether — and Kelly was around the NBA all the time,” Ken explained. “He got to go to all the Raptor games. He met the players, went to practices. When we decided to move back to B.C., his concern was, who was going to see him play basketball in Kamloops? I just told him, ‘If you’re good, people will find you.’”

Indeed, when you’re seven-foot, and your game is a high school approximation of Dirk Nowitzki, you don’t need a searchlight on your head for people to take notice.

“Ten years ago, a kid from Canada was just a kid from Canada,” an NBA player agent told The Sun.

“There was a little bit of a stigma about the Canadian basketball player. But now you see Canadian kids with great skills who are drafted in the first round. It’s a big change from the past. Canadian kids are taken seriously, and that’s helped Kelly quite a bit. Here’s a big Canadian kid blowing up in major college competition. Gonzaga is becoming a basketball factory, and Kelly is leading the charge. You can argue that he’s as strong as anyone out there.”

And you can make the case — as Ken Olynyk’s agent callers keep reminding him — that next step up the ladder for his son should be the top rung.

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B.C.’s Kelly Olynyk: Redshirt, then red hot, now ready for the NBA

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